Free Driving With the Top Down by Beth Harbison Page B

and the trailer fishtailed behind her. She’d forgotten all about it. Fortunately, it righted itself and she gunned the motor onto the small road, watching the truck pass the turn in her rearview mirror. It was no time to get complacent, though she had to keep driving until she could get to a safe turnaround spot. That way, at least she’d be pointing in the right direction to get reliably into town, where she could drive straight to the sheriff’s office.
    They drove for about ten minutes until the quiet around them took over and it felt like they were well and truly safe. Colleen slowed the car and did an eighteen-point turn to reverse her direction and face the highway again.
    This time she drove slowly, wary of the trucker’s return, even while the possibility seemed excessively unlikely.
    “Once when I was little, a guy pulled up to the intersection in my neighborhood and said, ‘Did you ever see one of these?’ to all of us kids playing,” Tamara said. “I didn’t go over, but Amy Williams and her sister did—and he was … exposing himself. They went home and told their mom and she called the police and my mom totally freaked out.”
    “Did you freak out?”
    Tamara considered that for a moment. “No, I wondered what it looked like.” She looked at Colleen. “I mean, I’m not sorry now that I didn’t see—it was just that at the time, that was all anyone could talk about and I couldn’t even picture what it might look like.”
    “Unfortunately, I can.” Colleen shuddered at the idea of a grown man doing that to children.
    “Me too. Now. It’s really messed up to do that to kids.”
    “People are sick.”
    “More people than you think, probably,” Tamara agreed, then closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the seat. “Weirdos are everywhere. It’s more weird not to be weird.”
    “You may be right.”
    “Pretty sure I am.”
    Colleen turned left on Birch Street and was surprised to see that not only was the diner not there but it also looked like it never had been there. There was a gas station and a crummy wooden house, and the rest was overgrown brush. “I could have sworn this was where it was.”
    “Did you say the Henley Diner?”
    “Yes.”
    “Right there.” Tamara pointed not at the diner but at a billboard so small, with lettering in script, that it was hard to read at all. But the building in the picture was unmistakable. “Turn around and then go right. It’s a half a mile away.”
    “Thank goodness one of us can see.” She carefully maneuvered the car around and followed Tamara’s directions until, sure enough, the familiar old diner came into view. Blue-gray wood slats outside, a chimney shaped like R2-D2 pumping out delicious scents, and a small assortment of old pickup trucks and a few scattered practical college student cars in the parking lot.
    This was the place.
    It was hard to believe they had left her house in Frederick only that morning. Of course, her hunger and the fact that she’d had only crap food were probably contributing to her disorientation.
    But something told her everything was about to take a turn for the better. A good meal, a great dessert, a few more miles across the border into North Carolina, then they would stop for the night and get up bright and early to start again in the morning.
    Hopefully, then things would fall in line with her carefully mapped-out plans.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
    Bitty
    Dear Stranger,
    Everyone should have somebody to write a suicide note to. People kill themselves and leave suicide notes behind every day. Always addressing their children, parents, friends, anyone. I don’t have anyone to write mine to. So I’ll write it here, and whoever reads it … well, I guess you’re my closest friend.
    I’m currently writing from a booth at my college diner. That’s why I’m using this cheap spiral notebook paper. It was all they had at the drugstore. Do they still call them “drugstores”? I always wonder if